@Robusto Sure, the perception comes first, 'cause that's the direct sensory experience. We basically share that with other animals. But the question that linguistic relativity probes is whether and to what extent one's language (loosely, the nomenclature, as you put it) affects what one makes of one's perceptions, and how we think about them and about abstractions based on them etc.

Your example (different categorizations of colors in different languages) shows that this effect is very real. It can lead to different abilities to discriminate between colors: if you have two names for two colors or shades in yuor language but I call them by the same name in mine, then you're probably better trained in telling them apart.

We have the same input but we notice different things, due to the differences between our languages. And that can translate into somewhat different capacities for forming related concepts and playing with them in our heads.

But does that mean your language can fundamentally determine the structure and limitations of your thought? Or does it merely tweak around the edges of the vast range of our cognitive capacities? Or somewhere in between?

The theory of Universal Grammar posits that "a certain set of structural rules are innate to humans, independent of sensory experience", and that those rules are determined by our genetic endowment, which we largely share as members of the same species. But it also provides for principles that are not specific to the faculty of human language, and that opens the door for the innumerable differences between all the languages in the world.

Universal grammar (UG), in modern linguistics, is the theory of the genetic component of the language faculty, usually credited to Noam Chomsky. The basic postulate of UG is that a certain set of structural rules are innate to humans, independent of sensory experience. With more linguistic stimuli received in the course of psychological development, children then adopt specific syntactic rules that conform to UG. It is sometimes known as "mental grammar", and stands contrasted with other "grammars", e.g. prescriptive, descriptive and pedagogical. The advocates of this theory emphasize and partially...

Based on that, we must share basically identical structures of thought, determined by our genetic endowment, no matter the language we speak. So the deterministic theory of language relativity (that one's language fundamentally determines one's thought) appears to be false.

On the other hand, and on the next level, we can have a vast range of varieties of cognitive processes based on this same structure. This variety comes from acquired external data and principles not specific to the faculty of language. And modern language relativity explores this variety (in color discrimination, spatial imagination, etc etc).

Sorry for the ramble. It was partly me thinking out loud trying to wrap my mind around it as a layperson.

@Robusto People didn't stop dying from causes other than Covid-19 just because that virus went around. In order to make sense of that number of burial urns, we need first the normal mortality + the mortality caused by Covid-19, and then see whether these figures add up. (To be honest, I don't think they would.)

@Robusto But that article in Straits Times also says it's unclear how many were filled. At this point, I think that the real death toll is higher than what the CPC has said, but how much higher is an open question. Based on that same article, an undefined number people with other diseases probably did not get proper treatment due to the Covid-19 outbreak, but those were not counted as Coved-19 deaths.

However, counting the total number of victims of the pandemic will turn out to be difficult: the longer it lasts, the higher its impact on the economy. And long economic recessions also have an impact on mortality.

In many languages, the colors described in English as "blue" and "green" are colexified, i.e. expressed using a single cover term. To describe this English lexical gap, linguists use the portmanteau word grue, from green and blue, which the philosopher Nelson Goodman coined—with a different meaning—in his 1955 Fact, Fiction, and Forecast to illustrate his "new riddle of induction".
The exact definition of "blue" and "green" may be complicated by the speakers not primarily distinguishing the hue, but using terms that describe other color components such as saturation and luminosity, or other...

@Færd And it gives new life to the putdown "What color is the sky in your world?" ^_^

No, really, I begin to wonder if there is a real difference in what exactly each person sees in terms of the color spectrum. Does the sky to you look what I would call green or what I would call blue—or even what I would call red? It's an interesting question.

What happens if a rotating magnetic field is applied against viruses and bacteria ?
Applications of rotating magnetic fields
https://publiclab.org/wiki/applications-of-rotating-magnetic-fields-biotechnology-rotating-magnetic-fields-rmf-generator-x-device

The voiced (dento-(alveolo-))palatal nasal phoneme /ɲ/ is spelled ‹nh› in Portuguese or Occitan or Gascon or Provençal, <ñ› in Spanish or Galician or Asturian or Basque or Quechua, <ny› in Catalan, <gn› in French or Italian.

All the palatalized resonants in Romance and English (Spanish eñe and elle) derive from the "yod-ification" of Vulgar Latin > Proto-Romance, although there are a variety of sound changes that led to both of those.

Since we see it in all Modern Romance, it originated in their shared ancestor.

Phonologically. The spelling however clearly was settled after that.

Plosive clusters with /l/ like /pl/ became various things: think of rain from plovere, where you have "ll" in Spanish but "pi" in Italian and "ch" (pronounced like English "sh") in Portuguese. But Spanish still has the re-borrowed plano competing with llano, and they have plazas where the Italians have piazze and the French just places.

pluvious versus lluvoso

/kl/ also arrived in the same place: clamare > llamar in Spanish.

Compare "io mi chiamo" in Italian with "yo me llamo" in Spanish.

oculum and oleum led to a homophone, which is why Spanish and Portuguese bounced the collision and use an Arabic word for oil but a Latin one for eye.

I was wondering what are those who await an incident or a person called.
For example, if this is the original text:
"I am one of those who await the return of Jesus Christ"
and I want to turn it into this format:
"I am an ... of Jesus Christ."
what word can I use to complete the ab...

The 64.910 positive tests for Corona in Germany are the result of 918.460 tests in total.

In other words, 93% of the tests were negative.

And out of the 64k, 25k have recovered.

So that leaves us with 39k people sick out of 1 million.

That is something we can actually work with.

I never liked it how the Johns Hopkins number always went up because it can always only go up by definition. 1187798 it is showing right now. In big red letters. As if the 300000+ people had never recovered.